STEPHEN COULTER – Players in a Dark Game. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968. Originally published in the UK as A Stranger Called the Blues: Heinemann, hc, 1968. An intrigue story in India and environs which does not live up to its promises.

JOHN CREASEY – Stars for the Toff. Walker, hardcover, 1968; paperback reprint: Lancer Lancer Books 74-606, 1970. UK edition: Hodder & Stoughton, hc, 1968. This 50th adventure of Richard Rollison is good Creasey and very good Toff. Rollison is drawn into the case of Madame Melinska, a medium with impressive powers who is accused of swindling the gullible public.

AUGUST DERLETH – A Praed Street Dossier. Mycroft & Moran, hardcover, 1968. Solar Pons aficionado or not, you will be considerably pleased by this book, which should help Pons along the road to [the] larger than life immortality followed by Holmes years ago. Particularly fascinating are some 55 pages from the notebook of Dr, Lyndon Parker, who chronicled Pon’s adventures, and several chapters of marginalia on the origins of Pons and Parker.

THOMAS B. DEWEY – The King Killers. Putnam, hardcover. 1968; paperback reprint: Berkley X1665, 1969. Chicago private-eye ”Mac” is back with one of his well engineered capers, involving a murder and the neofascist League for Good Government. And you’ll enjoy an unusually attractive secondary characterization.

Stephen Coulter wrote one of the better Bond style series about Brit adventurer and secret agent Charles Hood (Shamelady, Sgt. Death, Hammerhead …). He was usually one of the better adventure/suspense novelists, but I suppose everyone has a bad day.

S.H. Courtier was a terrific writer and Murder’s Burning is one that almost anyone would enjoy.

Good outings for the Toff and Dewey’s Mac, and I’m a long time fan of Solar Pons and Derleth, the rare pastiche that comes to almost rival the original.

Coulter wrote the Charles Hood books as James Mayo. There were a LOT of Bond imitators around then. I can’t remember if I ever read any of these or not. There were two more in the series that you didn’t mention, ASKING FOR IT and THE MAN ABOVE SUSPICION; neither has been published in the US.

HAMMERHEAD was made into a movie with Vince Edwards playing Hood. It also features Judy Geeson as the female co-star, which might be a reason for watching it, but some IMDB commenters have panned it something awful.

It doesn’t seem to have been commercially released on VHS or DVD, but I have seen it offered to collectors with Japanese subtitles — probably not a big handicap to overcome if that’s the only way you can get it.

For some reason, I don’t seem to own a copy of the Derleth book; either that or my book database has gone bad, as I’m sure I had it at one time.

There is one more Mayo book, Let Sleeping Girls Lie that did get published here. Hood is sort of an international detective that works for a conglomerate of semi disguised international corporations that are pretty easy to id as Rothschilds, Brit Petroleum, De Beers, Brit. Steel, Christies, etc.. He’s a sort of international trouble shooter. A bit more posh than Bond, and more of a clothes horse — he has a valet and a much nicer flat than Bond’s place — but the books are well written. He makes his first appearance in Hammerhead in white tie and tails with a long white silk scarf. Bond never got fancier than a dinner jacket in the books.

Coulter/Mayo was good at the action scenes and plots well, and the sex and racy aspects are a bit more playful than Bond in general. Sgt. Death is generally considered the best in the series. There is a good heist in Let Sleeping Girls Lie, and Mayo shows some wit here and there like a French strip club whose name translates as ‘The Erection” for any reader who knows his French slang.

If I remember right Coulter is an Australian which may explain why Hood is even more traditionally an upper middle class Brit than Bond. Peter Wimsey would have thought Bond a thug — Hood was one of his ‘sort.’

I was unlucky enough to see Hammerhead once. Awful film, with Edwards wooden and badly cast as Hood. Peter Vaughn was decent enough as the villain if he had a better script to work with. It’s not one you would want to put much effort into finding unless you are a completist. I think it ran as a double feature with the Adam West Batman film after it’s initial release — to give you an idea, the Batman film was better.